Since its debut, online shopping platforms have seen a massive boom in success because of its reliability, convenience, and ease of use. The post-COVID era has only amplified the need for such platforms with a steady skyrocketed growth with no foresight of slowing down.
If you’re a business owner selling physical or digital goods and services, you should capitalize on this online demand straight away. To boost your sales and customer portfolio, you can either sign up for a popular E-commerce platform such as Amazon, eBay, Flipkart, Aliexpress, Alibaba, Daraz, etc., where you won’t have to do much work to start selling your products, but you will have to bare the expenses as a cut from your profits and adhere to platform rules and guidelines.
Or you can consider setting up your online store and growing your own business according to your own rules without any restrictions. By opening your online store with WooCommerce and WordPress, you may increase your visibility & potential online.
If executed correctly, you’ll not only become a household name to your customers and potential customers, but you’ll also become a relevant and reliable name in the market by providing the level of customer satisfaction that requires a professional touch.
Create Your Online Store Using WordPress and Woocommerce:
For brand-new businesses, creating websites using self-hosted platforms like WordPress is highly recommended. It’s a cost-effective choice to create your first website because it can manage every aspect of your fully functional online business without breaking a sweat. Additionally, it offers a variety of configurable styles and features from which you can choose.
Whether you’re setting up a brand-new business or have an existing physical store, creating a website using reliable self-hosted platforms like WordPress can go a long way towards helping your business flourish.
WordPress is the most cost-effective website builder with 43% – 45% of all websites powered by this amazing free CMS platform. Most of these websites’ E-Commerce functionality is driven by WooCommerce.
With these two robust pieces of software, you can easily create, customize, and manage your new E-Commerce platform that best represents your brand identity.
In this quick discussion, we’ll give you a brief rundown on how you can do so, with some additional resources.
WooCommerce is a Great Tool for Building an Online Store Because It Offers the Following Benefits:
- The base plugin is free.
- WooCommerce provides the ability to use any essential WordPress plugins for eCommerce websites.
- Like WordPress, it’s also an open-source platform, making it highly customizable and community-driven.
- Reliable and easy step by step set up process.
- Easy product insertion and configuration menu.
- Highly functional WooCommerce extensions.
- WordPress WooCommerce requires no changes to your existing website.
Here’s How You Can Create Your Own Online WooCommerce Shop:
By following these simple steps, shown below, you’ll be able to start up an online marketplace in no time.
Step. 1: Signing Up for a Domain Name and Hosting Provider
Simply put, the name of a website is its domain name. It is the character that follows the dot (.) in a web address or the dot (@) in an email address. Your domain name is typically what you say when someone asks where they can find you online. Google.com is an example of a domain name.
To get you started, you’ll need to purchase a domain name, so that you can use it as a web address. And you’ll also require a hosting service provider to host your E-Commerce website.
The great thing is that you can opt for a service that can offer 24/7 stable and scalable hosting solutions that also come with SSL certification and a domain in the same package.
There are multiple excellent hosting options on the market. We recommend that you go through the best WordPress hosting solutions and pick the best option for you.
Step. 2: WordPress Installation
This is the easiest step of this whole process. Just simply log into your hosting service provider’s dashboard and navigate to your WordPress installation section to install the program with the instructions provided by the hosting service provider.
This should be a fairly streamlined process. When you’re done, you’ll be redirected to a blank website page with a pre-installed default WP theme. You can start adding plugins and changing the default theme to your preferred free/premium WordPress theme.
Step. 3: Install WooCommerce Plugin
You’re almost there, this is the most important plugin. You need to install the WooCommerce Shop plugin. Just simply click on the Plugins menu from the WordPress Dashboard and click on Add New. Now search for the WooCommerce plugin from the right-hand side search box.
And install the plugin. Once you’ve activated the plugin, you’ll be prompted to configure the WooCommerce wizard by adding some necessary information regarding your store to finish the setup process.
When you’re done setting up the WooCommerce plugin, you’ll need to create the following pages:
Shop page: to showcase and sell your products.
Cart page: where the customers add, calculate, and select their products before checkout.
Checkout page: where the customers select the delivery and payment method.
My Account page: this is an essential page to have for a modern eCommerce website, allowing users to log in, keep track of their orders, payment processes, and catalog of order history.
Once you’ve finished creating these pages, the very next thing you should do is start adding products to your WooCommerce storefront. It’s a very streamlined process if you already didn’t know – ‘’how to add WooCommerce product’’.
Step. 4: Choose a Theme That Works With Your Online Store
We recommend you select a responsive theme that provides extensive customization options, from any reputable WordPress marketplace for themes, such as ThemeForest.
These are the things that you should look for when choosing a WordPress theme:
- Reliability, you need a reliable theme that won’t cause any instability on your website.
- Scalability. The theme you choose must not conflict with your other plugins and the latest version of WordPress.
- The theme must be responsive and mobile-friendly.
- The theme must come with all the necessary templates, demos, and blocks to create a robust marketplace and storefront.
- Lightweight and SEO-friendly.
Step. 5: Customization
Aesthetics can be a key selling factor for your eCommerce website. You should put some significant effort into customizing your website for the best UI/UX experience possible. You can even take advantage of a website customizer plugin for a better customization experience with more options and elements.
If you lack the confidence of doing it yourself, you can always reach out to an expert in the field for some professional advice.
Taking Advantage of WooCommerce Online Store Extensions:
The WooCommerce plugin allows you to add a lot of extensions. All of these extensions are incredibly helpful by adding additional features and functionality to your eCommerce store page. These extensions are a great way to avoid adding unnecessary items to WordPress that could’ve caused longer load times.
Payment gateways, shipping extensions, booking extensions, accounting extensions, composite products, etc. are a few of these officially permitted extensions, with more third-party extensions available on the market right now.
Conclusion
WooCommerce & WordPress are without any doubt the best developed and mature platforms for setting up scalable platforms that will be a fine addition to your business and going forward. By following these simple steps, you’ve not only created a smooth-performing WordPress website, but you’ve also ensured your business and sales growth for the days to come.
